Back with another monthly report for the activity and happenings here at buttonmashing.com.

June was a lazy month around these parts. Nat was unplugged and I played GTA IV. Nice summer weather was enjoyed and crazy storms were weathered. We had 22 posts with 67 comments. The site also celebrated its fourth anniversary.

Top posts
The following posts garnered the most eyeballs in June (outside of the regulars):

Previously, on buttonmashing
One year ago, among other things, we were talking about Forza 2 for the 360.
Two years ago, I was marveling at the beauty of my brand new DS Lite.
Three years ago it was all about Guild Wars. My, how time and tastes change.
And four years ago? It was Wario Ware time.

Strange Searches
As always, a small sampling of the diverse paths that led people to our humble abode:

“let me show you this spreadsheet because” – oh man, don’t leave me hanging like that!
“360 button mashing techniques” – you mean, other than just… mashing them?
“easy way to get 5 day survivor achievement in dead rising” – There is none! There is only pain.
“eve in wall-e is ticklish” – I saw Wall-E (LOVED IT) but, for the life of me, cannot think of any reason why anyone would ever need to search for this. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the answer. If you haven’t, what train of thought brought this search phrase to your mind? I NEED TO KNOW.
“eve wall-e tickled” – Again, with the tickling and Wall-E!

Games being played
Not much has changed, for me at least. As I near the end of GTA IV (I think), I’m already wondering what might take its place. I also finished Super Mario Galaxy, but with only 70 stars, I still have lots of mileage left on that bad boy. My DS sits mostly unused, except for the occasional NY Times Crossword puzzle.

I’ve never done this before, but I’ve always liked it when other blogs I read do their monthly reviews. So I thought I’d give it a try. Time to take a look at the month that was.

It seems like it’s been pretty much Halo 3 and Portal around these parts in October. Sure, we chatted about more than that, but I was pretty much playing Halo 3 exclusively (still am) and my posts had a decidedly Halo 3 slant. I’m actually disappointed to report we only had 16 posts this month. Again, I blame the amount of Halo 3 being played on the drop in post frequency.

Nat brought up the fact that’s he’s got a long list of games he wants to finish. I have one, too. It’s too long to admit. We were discussing this very topic one night on IM and I mentioned that since November is “National Novel Writing Month” we should hijack it and make it “National Finish a Game Month.” Me personally, I want to finish Halo 3 and find all the skulls. If there’s time after that, I want to eventually finish Pokemon Diamond. But one game at a time. Feel free to join us in the “NaFiGaMo.” Something like that.

So what posts got the most traffic this month? I get a lot of traffic from search engine referrals so some of the top posts are actually older posts. The top five posts for the month of October were:

There are a lot of people looking for Halo 3 stats. I happy to provide some hopefully useful information.

Of course, along with the regular searches for things like “Halo 3 Stats” and “Resident Evil 4 translations” I get some funny search terms. A few:

“tickling me” – This one baffles me. Sometimes I wish I could see into the mind of the person searching for something like “tickling me.” Maybe something crawled up his shorts and just really wanted to know what that thing that was “tickling him”? I wish I knew. Or maybe I’m glad I don’t. Of course, that’s not half as bad as the person looking for “tickling pee.” I just… Stop. Sadly, this eventually ends with someone looking for “tickling till pee.” I blame Nat.

“deer buttons” – They’re right next to the moose zippers and the bear patches.

So what about November? I’d really like to increase my posting frequency. I often feel like I’m neglecting you guys when I go a day or two without posting. It’s been great having Nat around to help, I just hope to get more content out on a daily basis. With the holidays quickly approaching, we’ll definitely have some timely content for that. Hopefully with the bad weather will also bring some more blogging time. Here’s to great November. Let me know if there is something you’d like to see me cover!

Since there aren’t any sporting events going on this evening (no college football games of note, the Indians have a day off, and who wants to watch pre-season NBA?) I’m working on some blog items, mostly updating plug-ins and playing around with their settings. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t totally *heart* WordPress.

I also have a couple other items to get to: For the time being, we won’t be hearing much from my newest co-blogger, Dark Reyule. He’s taking a break from gaming and blogging isn’t an option at the moment. I told him he’s still very much welcome around these parts, so hopefully he’ll still drop by once and a while. So the blogging will be coming primarily from me and Nat for the foreseeable future.

I’m also going through a bunch of drafts and stubs of posts I have sitting in various degrees of completion, so there may be the occasional post with some “older” content. Hopefully it will still be relevant in some way. The blogging will continue, even if morale doesn’t improve.

As for the musings: Anyone here listen to Major Nelson’s podcast? If so, is it just me, or has the podcast’s quality declined lately? When Major and his co-host “e” are talking about things like their latest travels or other minutia, I lose all interest. Their conversations also have an “inside joke” feel, but not everyone is in on it. This was something that turned me off of the Evil Avatar Radio podcast. I want to hear about games! Not how exciting your company retreat was! I don’t care who you saw at the Halo 3 launch. Tell me about the actual game. I do love when he interviews people in the “industry,” however. The interview with Marty O’Donnell was top-shelf. I love the music from the Halo Trilogy and hearing Marty talk about it was a treat. Get back to the games, Major.

I would also like to mention that the Halo 3 theater rocks. That is (not) all. More on that later.

Behold, the Gaming Glut of 2007, she is upon us. We here at Buttonmashing.com are well aware and are ready to go with the blogging you crave.

I haven’t been able to blog lately as we have family visiting from out of town. I was busy last weekend and I’ll be busy this week entertaining them (which thankfully includes lots of 360-time in the form of NCAA 08, Forza, and Burnout, so it’s not a total loss) but I don’t have as much time to blog as I’d like. Heck, I don’t have as much time to game as I’d like. I still haven’t finished Bioshock, which I must do before Tuesday. I hope to get to that soon.

We still have some good stuff on tap. Nat has told me he’s working on some Metroid Prime 3 posts and he just picked up some PSP games, so we’ll be hearing about those as well. He’s really enjoying MP3 and I am jealous. I need me a Wii!

Dark Reyule has been busy on the 360 front and he’s mentioned he’s got some reviews in the works, possibly one for Two Worlds. I know he’ll be busy with Halo 3 once it drops. We’ll be giving it the co-op business together.

I’ve also been asked by video game blogger extraordinaire Kyle Orland to guest-blog at his review site, Games for Lunch. The premise of the site is to take a game you’ve never played before, play it for an hour straight and then write up your impressions based on your first hour. I’m thinking of doing a Pixar game on the Xbox 360, something along the lines of Cars or Ratatouille (which I saw with the daughter and absolutely loved). I’ll probably play the game with the kiddos watching so I can get their impressions along with mine. Should be interesting. Of course, I’m always open for suggestions. Let me know of any 360 game that may have flown under my radar.

Finally, since we are almost seven days away from Halo 3, I’m declaring it Cuteness Overload Week here at buttonmashing.com. Since I won’t have a lot of time to dedicate to blogging, I’ll be going the easy route with a heaping helping of cuteness so cute you won’t be able to stand it. It’s just to remind everyone it’s not all about blasting aliens and pwning noobs on Live. There’s more to gaming than that. Sometimes we just need to be reminded.

It’s a great time to be a gamer.

(As an aside, tonight was the Prison Break premiere! What did you PB fans think?)

I just did the unthinkable — I attacked a Big Daddy (an Elite Bouncer, to be exact) with my pipe wrench. I was near a vita-chamber (a respawn point) and decided to pound a Big Daddy to a pulp with my wrench. It actually took a while but I did it. I’m not sure why I did, maybe I was hoping it was one of the secret achievements or something, but I took him down. Down to Chinatown. Sure, I went down a dozen times myself, but that’s beside the point.

So, ya, I’ve been busy playing Bioshock. Absolutely excellent game. If you want to read more about the game, I suggest you read Tom’s piece over at G-pinions.

I’ve also been busy posting at my other blog, Men of the Scarlet and Gray. College Football started tonight and we’ve been in preview mode all week over there getting ready for the 2007 Ohio State Football season to begin.

But I am alive and I believe my co-bloggers are as well. We’re still playing games when we can and regular posting should resume shortly. As far as games go, I think it will be Bioshock with a dash of Everquest 2 until Halo 3 for me, and then copious amounts of Halo 3. I’ve been actively recruiting work-mates to get in on the Halo 3 bandwagon. The more the merry! Hard to believe it’s less than a month away.

When I first started this site I never envisioned it growing larger than just me blogging. I actually resisted the idea of another blogger for a long time. Then as time went on, I noticed that I just simply can’t keep up with everything. Along with that, there are huge gaps in the amount of titles I can actually play. So I mulled over the idea of adding another blogger and decided to ask Nat if he’d join me. I was pretty excited when he joined the team a little while ago.

Recently I ran into a high school buddy of mine on MySpace (it’s not all bad, yo!). He and I were huge gamers back in the day and we fell out of touch for a while. After a little back and forth via email, we got together on Live for some Gears of War and had a blast. I told him about the site and made an offer to him, that if he was interested, I’d love to have him write for the site as well. He agreed and he’ll also be joining the buttonmashing.com team. He’ll go by the name Dark Reyule and he’ll be giving us some excellent content.

So now, as far as the site goes, here’s how I see things: I’ll be handling the majority of the day-to-day blogging and site stuff. Nat will throw in his two cents, blogging-wise, along with some more in-depth analysis and editorial content. He’ll also be our resident Sony expert. Dark Reyule will be our 360 guru, blogging about the goings-on with the 360, and will be providing us with his in depth reviews of games he’s been playing. We’ll have two of his reviews up soon one the site.

So in the period of a couple months, we’ve tripled in size and will hopefully be bringing some consistently good content.

You may (or may not) have noticed that I haven’t posted an announcement for the June edition of the Carnival of Gamers. I’ve lost a little steam when it comes to running the Carnival, so I decided the best thing I could do for the Carnival (and myself) could be to take a short break. Running the Carnival entails some legwork on my end and it’s been slowly falling down on the priority list. In fact, it seems that blog carnivals in general seem to be losing some steam. Perhaps they’re outliving their usefulness. Either way, it has been fun running the Carnival and I’ve enjoyed working with everyone, but for now I think it’s time the Carnival goes on a little hiatus.

That’s not to say there’s no interest. People are always contacting me, asking questions about the Carnival. Some want to participate, others want to host. So I don’t want to see it fall away completely. I think the Carnival is a great way for new bloggers to get exposure and for blog readers to find new blogs. I’ve come across quite a few good blogs over that 20+ carnivals. So it will take a break for the summer and we’ll take a look at the level of interest after that. Hopefully the break will be good for everyone involved.

I’m definitely not going to slow down here on the site itself, though. I’m pretty excited about the addition of a co-blogger and I’m getting the itch to change the look of the site, so hopefully we’ll be seeing changes very soon. Things will still be hopping around these parts.

Again, thanks to everyone that has helped out with the Carnival. It’s been a great run so far. We’ll see where it goes from here.

I’m extremely excited to announce the first addition to the blogging team here buttonmashing.com! Frequent commenter Nat (aka agentgray) will be joining me as a co-blogger here at buttonmashing.com. Even thought we’ve never actually met “in person,” I’ve “known” Nat for a while now. Through the wonders of the internet, we’ve played a bunch of Guild Wars together, spent time in each other’s Animal Crossing DS towns, and had quite a few chats about all things video games. We’ve tried unsucessfully to get together on Xbox Live, but I imagine that will change now that we’ll be colloborating on many things, including games on the Xbox 360.

As of right now, we don’t have any fixed plans as to what type of things Nat will blog about, so he’ll basically join me in various discussions about whatever games/gaming related material that we find interesting or that we hope you readers will find interesting. While we have a lot of gaming interests in common, I think Nat will bring a different point of view and experience in areas I don’t necessarily have the background to cover.

It’s been a light posting week for me. I’ve been fighting a cold and I’ve been fighting countless bad guys in Everquest 2. Couple that with a blogging funk, and you’ve got the makings of a light posting week. I’m heading out of town this weekend with just my DS in tow, so there won’t be much blogging anyway. Oh, and there’s a little Final Four game to worry about, too.

My repaired Xbox 360 arrived yesterday, but I’m nervous about hooking it back up. I’ll explain more later. For now, I’ll just let you know that I’m not dead.